Sketch Based Video Annotation and Organization System in Distributed Teaching Environment

As the use of instructional video is becoming a key component of e-learning, there is an increasing need for a distributed system which supports collaborative video annotation and organization. In this paper, the authors construct a distributed environment on the top of NaradaBrokering to support collaborative operations on video material when users are located in different places. The concept of video annotation is enriched, making it a powerful media to improve the instructional video organizing and viewing. With panorama based and interpolation based methods, all related users can annotate or organize videos simultaneously. With these annotations, a video organization structure is consequently built through linking them with other video clips or annotations. Finally, an informal user study was conducted and result shows that this system improves the efficiency of video organizing and viewing and enhances user’s participating into the design process with good user experience.

Mining Environmental Data in the ADMIRE Project Using New Advanced Methods and Tools

The project Advanced Data Mining and Integration Research for Europe (ADMIRE) is designing new methods and tools for comfortable mining and integration of large, distributed data sets. One of the prospective application domains for such methods and tools is the environmental applications domain, which often uses various data sets from different vendors where data mining is becoming increasingly popular and more computer power becomes available. The authors present a set of experimental environmental scenarios, and the application of ADMIRE technology in these scenarios. The scenarios try to predict meteorological and hydrological phenomena which currently cannot or are not predicted by using data mining of distributed data sets from several providers in Slovakia. The scenarios have been designed by environmental experts and apart from being used as the testing grounds for the ADMIRE technology; results are of particular interest to experts who have designed them.

A Grid-Aware Emergency Response Model (G-AERM) for Disaster Management

The emergency management community is working toward developments associated with the reduction of losses in lives, property and the environment caused by natural disasters. However, several limitations with the particular collaborative nature of current Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in use have been reported. In particular, how emergency management stakeholders within an ICT environment can bring together all their resources in a collaborative and timely manner so as to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of emergency response tasks. With this in mind, the authors describe the Grid-Aware Emergency Response Model (G-AERM) to make the best of functionality offered by emerging ICT to support intelligence in decision making toward a more effective and efficient emergency response management.

Toward a Quality-of-Service Framework for Peer-to-Peer Applications

P2P networks have caught the imagination of the research community and application developers with their sheer scalability and fault-tolerance characteristics. However, only content-sharing applications based on the P2P concept have reached the desired level of maturity. The potential of the P2P concept for designing the next-generation of real-world distributed applications can be realized only if a comprehensive framework quantifying the performance related aspects of all classes of P2P applications is available. Researchers have proposed some QoS (Quality-of-Service) parameters for content-sharing P2P applications based on response time and delay, but these do not cover the gamut of application domains that the P2P concept is applicable to. Hence, this research paper proposes an early QoS framework covering various classes of P2P applications; content distribution, distributed computing and communication and collaboration. Early results from the prototype implementation of the Peer Enterprises framework (a cross-organizational P2P collaborative application) are used as a basis for formulation of the QoS parameters. The individual performance measures which comprise the QoS framework are also discussed in detail along with some thoughts on how these can be complied with. The proposed framework would hopefully lead to quantifiable Service-Level Agreements for a variety of peer-to-peer services and applications.

Load Balancing to Increase the Consistency of Replicas in Data Grids

Data grids are current solutions to the needs of large scale systems and provide a set of different geographically distributed resources. Their goal is to offer an important capacity of parallel calculation, ensure a data effective and rapid access, improve the availability, and tolerate the breakdowns. In such systems, however, these advantages are possible only by using the replication technique. The use of this technique raises the problem of maintaining consistency of replicas of the same data set. In order to guarantee replica set reliability, it is necessary to have high coherence. This fact, however, penalizes performance. In this paper, the authors propose studying balancing influence on replica quality. For this reason, a service of hybrid consistency management is developed, which combines the pessimistic and optimistic approaches and is extended by a load balancing service to improve service quality. This service is articulated on a hierarchical model with two levels.

The Sicilian Grid Infrastructure for High Performance Computing

The conjugation of High Performance Computing (HPC) and Grid paradigm with applications based on commercial software is one among the major challenges of today e-Infrastructures. Several research communities from either industry or academia need to run high parallel applications based on licensed software over hundreds of CPU cores; a satisfactory fulfillment of such requests is one of the keys for the penetration of this computing paradigm into the industry world and sustainability of Grid infrastructures. This problem has been tackled in the context of the PI2S2 project that created a regional e-Infrastructure in Sicily, the first in Italy over a regional area. Present paper will describe the features added in order to integrate an HPC facility into the PI2S2 Grid infrastructure, the adoption of the InifiniBand low-latency net connection, the gLite middleware extended to support MPI/MPI2 jobs, the newly developed license server and the specific scheduling policy adopted. Moreover, it will show the results of some relevant use cases belonging to Computer Fluid-Dynamics (Fluent, OpenFOAM), Chemistry (GAMESS), Astro-Physics (Flash) and Bio-Informatics (ClustalW)).

Towards a More Scalable Schema Matching

With the development and the use of a large variety of DB schemas and ontologies, in many domains (e.g. semantic web, digital libraries, life science, etc), matching techniques are called to overcome the challenge of aligning and reconciling these different interrelated representations. Matching field is becoming a very attractive research topic. In this paper, the authors are interested in studying scalable matching problem. The authors survey the approaches and tools of large scale matching, when a large number of schemas/ontologies and attributes are involved. They attempt to cover a variety of techniques for schema matching called Pair-wise and Holistic. One can acknowledge that this domain is on top of effervescence and scalable matching needs many more advances. Therefore, they propose our scalable schema matching methodology that deals with the creation of a hybrid approach combining these techniques. Their architecture includes a pre-matching approach based on XML schemas decomposition. As shown by their experiments, their proposed methodology has been evaluated and implementing in a PLASMA (Platform for LArge Scale MAtching) prototype.

OBIRE

It has been widely recognized that bibliographic information plays an increasingly important role for scientific research. Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks provide an effective environment for people belonging to a community to share various resources on the Internet. This paper presents OBIRE, an ontology based P2P network for bibliographic information retrieval. For a user query, OBIRE computes the degree of matches to indicate the similarity of a published record to the query. When searching for information, users can incorporate their domain knowledge into their queries which guides OBIRE to discover the bibliographic records that are of most interest of users. In addition, fuzzy logic based user recommendations are used to compute the trustiness of a set of keywords used by a bibliographic record which assists users in selecting bibliographic records. OBIRE is evaluated from the aspects of precision and recall, and experimental results show the effectiveness of OBIRE in bibliographic information retrieval.

Collaborative e-Learning and ICT Tools to Develop SME Managers

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) create a dynamic and successful European economy. Existing skill deficiencies in sales, management and administrative staff are adversely affecting competitiveness in almost a third of those small firms surveyed (Bolden, 2001, 2007). Additionally, attending face-to-face and classroom-based development courses is problematic for time-poor SME managers. Thanks to the development of new technologies online learning is becoming commonplace due to wireless and mobile devices, together with the Internet boom, are providing the infrastructure necessary to support the development of new learning forms. Collaborative learning, especially as represented by an action learning approach, would seem ideal for SME managers. But can collaborative learning be adopted as a blanket approach in the case of SME managers? Or should one first take into account the contextual influences on learning, networking and collaboration?

Service and Management Oriented Traffic Information Grid

Traffic information service plays an important role in one’s daily life. However, traffic information processing is very complicated because of its dynamic, cooperative and distributed features. This paper presents the Service and Monitoring Oriented Traffic Information Grid. In this system, it is a remarkable characteristic to provide real-time, dynamic information services for travelers and traffic managers by grid technology. The system provides travelers with services of optimized route scheme, bus arrival prediction based on real-time route status, and route status forecast. For traffic managers, the system can provide vehicle tracing, traffic monitoring, history data analysis, and decision making on traffic control strategy. In this regard, key research includes large multi-source traffic data integration, route status forecast, and optimum dynamic travel scheme implementation based on massive GPS data.